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Academy Award-winner Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespearean novel, Hamnet, is a film about the collective expression of grief. By Andy Hazel.
‘We’re doing it together’: Hamnet director Chloé Zhao on the power of grief
Moments before the premiere of Hamnet at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, director Chloé Zhao did something unexpected. Instead of introducing her cast or thanking festival programmers, she asked the 2600 people in the room to slow down.
“What I love the most about being on a film set and also being at a film festival is that a group of people, mostly strangers, choose to come together and share time and space with each other, and create a community,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how lonely your situation is.
“I find great solace in that. As many of you know, the world can be a very lonely place sometimes.” Then she paused, closed her eyes and led us through a “very short and completely optional” somatic breathing exercise. “Breathe in. And sigh...”
It was a jarringly earnest opening for one of the most anticipated films of the year. It is also a statement of directorial intent. Hamnet is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, a fictionalised account of the short life of Agnes and William Shakespeare’s son and the impact of his death on an attentive and loving mother, and a father who is in London writing and staging plays. Despite an extraordinary fidelity to the story’s Elizabethan setting, Zhao’s film is focused on how grief moves through a relationship and across time; how it can be transformed as it refuses resolution.
The gesture also reflects Zhao’s growing confidence in shaping not only her films but the conditions in which they are received. After a decade in which she rose from micro-budget American indies about outsiders and itinerants to the centre of the global studio system, Hamnet marks a return to intimacy.
If anything, Zhao is now more explicit about what she is asking of audiences. When we speak the following morning, alongside the film’s star Jessie Buckley, Zhao is clearly buoyed by the first wave of emotive reviews. “Every interview I’ve done today, people have been crying,” she tells me. “It’s allowed. It’s the point of this.”
Zhao built her reputation on films that move outward: across the American West in her 2015 debut, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, and its critically acclaimed follow-ups, The Rider and Nomadland, then further out into the cosmic sprawl of Marvel’s Eternals. These films show her ability to create emotional specificity in vast physical or conceptual landscapes. Hamnet is an inversion of this.
“I made four films in my 30s that were horizon-chasing films,” Zhao says. “They go very wide and expansive. When I turned 40 and went through some difficult midlife stuff, I realised I was running away from myself.”
O’Farrell’s novel offered a new challenge. “One stage, one room. There’s nowhere else to go but to descend,” Zhao says. “It’s really uncomfortable, but when I read Maggie’s book, it provided the perfect container for that. Then I met Jessie and Paul [Mescal], and there was no question after that.”
Buckley’s performance as Agnes Shakespeare is already gathering accolades on its way towards a likely Best Actress Academy Award in March. O’Farrell, who collaborated closely with Zhao on the adaptation, says she was immediately confident in the casting. “I knew Chloé would never make a pristine, costume-y period drama,” she says. “And I knew she wanted Agnes and the children at the centre.”
Zhao resists any suggestion of control over Buckley’s work. “On the day we shot Hamnet’s death, everyone knew how sacred that day was,” she says. “My only job was to create an environment where people felt safe enough to feel the loss of someone they loved.” She did not choreograph Buckley’s grief or pre-empt its limits. “I had no idea where Jessie was going to go. My duty was to witness what is truly present in that moment and protect it fearlessly in the edit, right? That is my only job.”
The idea of witnessing rather than defining recurs throughout Zhao’s process. “The camera does something miraculous,” she says. “I mean, some indigenous people are afraid it’s going to take their soul, and they’re probably right. The camera is truly able to capture the energy of presence, and then that presence transcends time and space. So, therefore, when you’re watching the film, that energy gets transmuted. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from – past, present, future – you are going to feel the presence of the grief of that woman. While we’re shooting, 500 years ago, yesterday.”
Zhao was born Zhao Ting in Beijing in 1982. Her mother worked in a hospital and her father led one of China’s largest steel companies as a wave of industrialisation swept the country. It made him extremely wealthy. Almost as soon as she was able, Zhao pushed back against the privilege she was born into and sought ways to connect with people from other backgrounds.
“To speak honestly,” she says, “I had a difficult upbringing. I really didn’t feel safe in my own body, so I felt I had to go into my mind. I’m very grateful for that because it led me to storytelling, but you can’t live your whole life like that.”
The stories she loved tended to be American and British. When Zhao was offered an opportunity to move overseas, she took it. Aged 14 and speaking very little English, she enrolled at the prestigious Brighton College in England and completed high school in Los Angeles. There she saw the film that made her want to become a director: Wong Kar Wai’s dreamy and visceral exploration of toxic queer masculinity, Happy Together. It’s a film Zhao still watches before each film she makes.
Even Shakespeare reached her indirectly. “Growing up in China, he was very revered. I never understood Shakespeare linguistically because of the language barrier, but symbolically I did. I was obsessed with Macbeth. I think he really transmutes in symbols and that’s why his work is so universal. The three witches and Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep, the toad in the skull? So many of those images are unforgettable.”
Zhao credits the power of her film’s performances to her embrace of dreamwork, a practice introduced by Buckley and facilitated by practitioner Kim Gillingham. The method treats dreams not as symbols to analyse or interpret but as creative spaces to inhabit. “It changed how I work,” Zhao says. “It changed my life.”
When asked about how it works in practice, Zhao defers to Buckley. “In a basic way, what it is is you start to take account of your dreams,” Buckley explains. “You record them, you write them down. Often when I start work on a script or enter an imagined world, a lot of that world will start seeping into my unconscious in ways that I don’t realise, and dreamwork is a way of realising what it is your unconscious is asking and inviting you to bring to the surface.
“When [Gillingham] meditates you into the dream, you start inhabiting the different points of view within that dream. So, let’s say I bump into Nick Cave in my dream. At first, I’m observing Nick Cave from my perspective, but then she’ll ask me to inhabit Nick Cave, observing me and what he wants me to know in some way. There is something fable-like about a dream that has road maps. I’m a bit scared about talking about them because it’s more mercurial. It helps me inhabit a world rather than projecting an idea of who I think this person is, because I would never ever think that I knew the person I was inhabiting.”
Cast members practised dreamwork individually and collectively, often lying on the ground and breathing together before shooting. These sessions became more important as the film built towards its close, the unveiling of Shakespeare’s first performance of Hamlet – a scene where the film deviates from the book.
For Zhao, the project coincided with the end of her relationship with British cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Hamnet is the first of Zhao’s films for which Richards is not credited. When I ask Zhao how personal the film is to her, Buckley lays a hand on her knee. “You don’t have to do anything,” she says.
“No, I know. I think we can talk about it,” Zhao tells her. “The ending of the film was not in the script until a week before we wrapped. I knew, as a filmmaker, if you directly shoot what is on the page in the book, it doesn’t have the catharsis. How do you even convey the mood, the magnitude of what is on the page?
“It was getting close to the end of filmmaking, and at a similar time, an important relationship for me was ending. So every night when I went back to the hotel room, I was feeling intense heartache, tenderised internally and externally, so confused, and so scared of separation. There I was without the ending of the film, just sitting there like a zombie.
“The next day, on my way to work, it’s raining, my phone beeps, and it was Jessie. And she sent me…” Zhao lets out a shaky sigh and Buckley’s hand returns to her knee. “She sent me Max Richter’s ‘This Bitter Earth/On the Nature of Daylight’. I listened to the song, and … I just wanted to feel, to be part of nature.
“I don’t want to be separated from the people I love. I don’t want to be separate from the life I love. And then suddenly I realised that boy onstage, Hamlet, was in so much pain. Even as life is hard, he’s still afraid to let go. What the boy needed was for the audience to reach out to him, to tell him that separation is an illusion.”
Zhao sees Hamnet as part of a throughline in her career rather than a departure. “Every one of my films is about grief,” she says. “Losing home, purpose, community, loved ones.”
On set, Zhao treated grief as something that had to move. After the heaviest scenes, she would ask the cast and crew to dance, not as catharsis, but to stop the feeling from hardening.
“Emotion is energy,” she says. “If it stays stuck, suffering grows around it.” It’s advice she extends to audiences as well. Hamnet does not resolve grief so much as redistribute it, and Zhao is sceptical of loss that can be contained within a single character or a tidy ending. What matters is circulation: between actors and crew, between the players and the crowd in Shakespeare’s Globe, and between the film and its audience. Grief, Zhao says, is never singular for long, and for as long as the film is being watched, it belongs to everyone in the room.
“Every time we show the film, the audience helps us contain our grief,” she says. “We’re doing it together.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 7, 2026 as "The suits of woe".
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